Psychology 1000 Chapter Notes - Chapter 16: Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Anxiety Disorder, Mental Disorder

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Derek Quinlan

Document Summary

At any given point in time, 26% of the population suffers from a diagnosable mental disorder. Nearly half of all north americans between the ages of 15-54 will experience a psychological disorder at some point in their lives. One adolescent commits suicide every 90 seconds. Abnormal behaviour: behaviour that is personally distressing, personally dysfunctional, and/or so culturally deviant that other people judge it to be inappropriate or maladaptive. History is filled with accounts of prominent people who suffered from psychological disorders. Throughout history, human societies have explained and responded to abnormal behaviour in different ways at different times, based on their values and assumptions about human life and behaviour. Hippocrates believed the site of mental illness was the brain. By the 1800"s, western medicine had returned to viewing mental disorders as biologically based and was attempting to extend medical diagnoses to them. In the early 1900"s, freud"s theory of psychoanalysis ushered in psychological interpretations of disordered behaviours.